


far above, far below

by literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Agender Character, Bisexuality, Dathomir, Gen, Nonbinary Character, POV First Person, Prose Poem, Run-On Sentences, Stream of Consciousness, and also
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 02:44:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17737511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte/pseuds/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte
Summary: I am not brother. Always remember I am hunter.I felt the burn of a thousand cuts, the deaths of a thousand Sith, and they were made stronger in me. You know nothing. Nothing about who I am. Nothing about what I want.





	far above, far below

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a rush while thinking about how Maul came from a heavily gender segregated culture, how the quote I used in the summary is both aimed at the character Maul is speaking to AND to us reading it, how there's always been proud & out genderweirdos but we can't forget the ones who existed in secret too, with their private desires and passions. sometimes it's not because you're afraid or ashamed to come out. sometimes it's just not anyone else's damn business. and sometimes you're a Sith who has no friends to come out to because you hate everyone, which is also valid.

Around me the iron-salt stench of the bog and sulphur rising from boiling lakes deep under the surface. Thin tunic crusted with flakes of dried mud. I am a child with a wooden sword. And the witches are dancing and screaming when they find me. Between the trees oozing like snail eye-stalks, thick as molasses and bitter as almonds. Songs like thunderstorms like planets split in half like swollen bodies under the meridian. Twig-woven hair braided with teeth and mouths smeared dark with blood.

Little animal I am when they kiss me and laugh and run away following rancor’s footprints playing games with it. In the village of prey we are always afraid, of being selected. Fear cradled as a knife between the ribs. To be a girl and to hunt. To be rain in the night tip-toeing on the thatched rooftops glistening under the moon with small wrist-blades and arrowheads on my chest. Boys sit by the fire and boys strangle each other for stale bread and boys gleam with cold sweat as they train on the snowy mountainside. One of us falls. None of us cry.

Two years past I once chanted I am a nightsister I have chosen you. Smiled and in sweetest springwater voice promised he would die for me. I did not wear the red cloth but he perfumed my neck and kissed my feet. Alcoves of stolen comfort. Now the metallic taste on my tongue. Like white noise endless memory-pain of the moment he died echoing. Red incense smoke in my eyes and the ache of cracked chitin. Gone when the sisters carve his bones into talismans. Their alchemy stronger than me. I feel him and then I don't. In the morning I hear birds and there is more soup for me.

Tangerine fire spirals in the sky. Milk-mucus smears itself on the clouds, some pregnant beast seeking shelter. Girls know. Girls find and take. I scratch my name on the walls of a cave and light flickers in primordial pools against my eyelids. Shadows of shadows I move. Like fingertips on my spine tremble-touch. I sense when the girls are coming and where they come from. I know the man in my dreams and the temple where we kneel together before an army of the dead, silhouettes of coal dust and sacred rites of revenge. It calls to me.

This is a world of women and men but there is a universe beyond. I begged for their feral girl-child magic and woke up with a power even worse. Master breaks and remakes me. Another father for me to be a son for. Slow droplets onto my forehead from estradiol stalactites. Before or after or I am during. To betray him is to make him proud so I lie and lie and lie. Twin Dathomir suns see nothing but a child with a wooden sword.

On smuggler’s moons and pirate’s deserts I have died and lived and died again. Sharpening my body into a spear with raw welts and rope burns. Smoking huts in the distance. Copper smell of slain villagers. Under the stars of a sweltering jungle I sleep on my tender chest. The bile of passion rises in me. Never bandage these wounds. I will die in the alkali-white dunes of my avenger without telling another soul. No one deserves to know me.


End file.
